Monthly Archive for November, 2009

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25% Return on Investment Courtesy of Coinstar

Published on November 21, 2009 in Baby Boomer. 0 Comments

From the people who charge you 8.9% to count your loose change comes the best deal you will see this year.

Take your coins to Coinstar, select that you want to redeem your coins for a certificate from a participating retailer, and Coinstar will send you a $10 rebate.

There is a $40 minimum to get the rebate, so be careful when plugging that loose change into Coinstar, if you put in less than $40, you get zilch. Put in more than $40 and your ROI drops below 25%.

I had a couple stashes of change and Nancy through in her piggy bank accumulation and I trudged to Coinstar. On the way, I had the blinding flash that if I didn’t have $40 worth of coins, I was screwed.

I stopped at the local car wash and pumped in a couple ten dollar bills into the coin changer and loaded up my pockets. $20 worth of quarters gave me the urban fashion styling I have been seeking.

Our Coinstar locations are inside Kroger.
There is a bank in Kroger that is open late on Saturday.

Dur.

Walk up to counter, change two twenties into 160 quarters! Put the 160 quarters into the Coinstar, $40 at a time and I get an eCertificate each for $40 to spend online (or at the store if available) with a rebate form for $10.

  • Amazon.com®
  • Borders®/Waldenbooks
  • Cabela’s®
  • CVS/Pharmacy®
  • Eddie Bauer®
  • iTunes
  • JCPenney®
  • Lowe’s®
  • Old Navy
  • Overstock.com®
  • Regal Entertainment Group
  • Rixty
  • Starbucks®

Since I’m putting a buck into every Salvation Army bucket I pass this year, the Coinstar 25% return on investment will keep churning through the community.

It’s the Sixty version of Kiva!!!

UPDATE: My tax adviser sends word from Ashland, Kentucky that my donations are fully deductible. Since I’m in the 35% bracket, that means my 25% ROI jumps to 152% ROI he says.

I’ll be spending a lot of time at Kroger.

How Many Pounds in a Gallon of Fat? JFGI!

Published on November 20, 2009 in Baby Boomer. 2 Comments


Remember this?
What do you want for your birthday?
A Henway.
What’s a Henway?
About three pounds.

So far, I’ve lost about 11 hens. If I could somehow export my loss to Peru, I would be able to buy one of those cars I lusted after.

Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Col. Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told police it was worth $60,000 a gallon ($15,000 a liter).

I am convinced you can Google any question and get the answer.

Yesterday, Nancy and I had one of those moments when we couldn’t recall the married name of woman. I Googled it, and in the third result was the answer.

Nancy will sit beside me with the netbook and ask me something like, where is Gabon? Since I am used to being the expert on everything in our family, I stammer out an answer or an answer formulated on the premise:  “if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit.”

And then I realize she has the window to all the knowledge in the universe at her fingertips.

I am going to start abbreviating my answer: JFGI.
bart_google

Bag 'o Blubber

Bag 'o Blubber

A liter of human fat weighs about four pounds.  I’m down 10 liters.

$150,000 in Peru.

I need to drop another 40 pounds, so I may be making one of those medical procedure vacations soon.

“I can’t see why there would be a black market for fat,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all because in most countries we can get fat so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate that I don’t see why there would ever be a black market for fat, of all tissues.”

Which of course is unanswerable.

I guess kidneys sell for a lot more per pound, but the nice thing about fat is, it’s easy to regenerate.

Total Knee Replacement: Potentially Costly Sitting and Thinking

Published on November 19, 2009 in Baby Boomer. 0 Comments Tags: , .


Since the Total Knee Replacement, (ta-da-dummmmmmmm) my physical activity is even more limited than prior to the removal and reinstallation.

Since I’m dieting my lack of physical activity is even more restricted.

Prior to this, my lack of physical activity was because I was lazy. Aside from mowing and walking the dogs and following Nancy around Kroger throwing Oreo cookies, cheese puffs, Miller Chill, Oscar Mayer Bologna and M & M’s into the basket, I had no physical activity.

Now that limited activity is limited even more.

1. I  can’t walk much and 2. I can’t eat much.

I have been sitting and thinking.

I took the Pledge Not to Veg in front of the Tee Vee as long as the weather cooperated. Up  until this week it cooperated perfectly. Great time to sit outside and ponder. I would schlep the laptop outside and proceed to surf.

Somehow, this seems different from Veging.

It became potentially costly when I stumbled across a story about Factory Five cars.

RED33hotrod

Yeah, cool, right?

It’s a kit car. They send everything but the engine and drive train and you put it together in your basement or garage.

Prices start at $19,990. I could handle that.

Estimated build time: 300 hours. Averaging three hours a week that’s just a couple years. I could handle that.

I spent a lot of time reading their website and even ordered the brochure and the DVD.

No way could I handle that! Who the heck am I kidding? I turn the air blue when the leaf blower comes unplugged unexpectedly. No way am I doing to strip down a donor car and rebuild a new car from a kit.

Then this popped up on my screen. A 1941 Dodge Deluxe Luxury Liner.

41dodge

Yeah, cool, right?

It was a low-mileage one-owner that ran. I could handle that.

It was about 100 miles away. I could handle that.

They were asking $7,500. I could handle that.

But it was sold (of course!)

Can you find two cars any more different? Yet I  came seriously close to owning one of them. A $45,000 kit hot rod vs. a $7,500 Geezer-mobile.

Owning the Smart has “learnt me a lesson” as we say here ’bouts.

smart

I like driving unusual cars.

I like it when people rubber-neck and give you a thumbs up. Even a chuckle is OK. But I also like having parts and service readily available and somebody to get their hands cold and dirty when something breaks in February.

The Bible of Unusual Cars aka Hemmings Motor News, is having a discussion…

Do resto-mods, hot rods and customs have a rightful place in the collector car hobby? If so, what is their place, and what should be done or not done about it?

So while they are battling it out over who to exclude, there are those of us who would love to be in any little corner of this hobby, but just can’t pull the trigger.

But sometimes we spend a lot of time thinking about it. And come close, very close.

Unfriend or Defriend? Luke Russert Weighs in for NBC as Congressional Correspondent

Published on November 17, 2009 in Baby Boomer. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

“Unfriend” is the word of the year, as declared by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

lukerussert

Congressional correspondent Luke Russert (and son of St. Timothy of Buffalo)  corrected the “Unfriend” report saying, “the kids say ‘Defriend.’ Oxford Dictionary should find that out.”

“the kids”, yeah, Luke Russert called Facebookers “the kids.”

  • Unfriend Luke Russert!
  • Defriend Luke Russert!
  • Deface Luke Russert!
  • Unbook Luke Russert!
  • Debook Luke Russert!

Go Behind The Scenes for a Sneak Peek at Multiple Sarcasms

Published on November 17, 2009 in Baby Boomer. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Huh!?! Should I be flattered or insulted that a PR flack sent me a pre-release sneak peek of a movie coming out this spring called Multiple Sarcasms?

Yeah, flattered.

Multiple irreverences/Multiple Sarcasms, it fits here.

It’s a movie about a play about a life that is falling apart.

Huh!?! I may have just moved over to the insulted side again. (Rant about a blog about a life that is falling apart?)
multiplesarcasms
Nah, I’m back to flattered.
Any movie poster featuring a toilet is in my wheelhouse.
Multiple Sarcasms is set in 1979 New York and has an amazing cast including Timothy Hutton, Mira Sorvino, Dana Delany, Mario Van Peeples and Stockard Channing.

Here’s one of the sneak peeks of behind the scenes:

Check this out – Multiple Sarcasms
DIRECTED BY:Brooks Branch (his first attempt at writing and directing!)
WRITTEN BY:Brooks Branch and Linda Morris (Emmy award winner for Frasier)

CAST:
Timothy Hutton
Mira Sorvino
Dana Delany
Mario Van Pebbles
India Ennenga
Laila Robins
Stockard Channing

Another behind the scenes look:

A richly textured drama about self discovery leavened by humor and irony, Multiple Sarcasms follows Gabriel Richmond as he takes an unconventional path to shedding his life of convention by writing a play. As the play becomes about his life, the process proves both disruptive and healing for him as well as his close knit group of family and friends. Drawn into Gabriel’s turmoil, his wife, best friend and business partner begin re-examining their own lives and relationships with him, while others like his daughter and agent provide the stability to help him pull through.

This will be fun!
I don’t mean the film will be fun, (it might have some fun parts from watching the sneak peek, though.)
I mean it will be fun to watch the publicity machine crank into full gear leading up to the inevitable talk show tours pre-release.
And you can say you first learned about it here.
This movie will be a smash.
It has a great ensemble cast delving into topics that are rich in emotions.
Another first…
you read it here first…
Oscar!

And Brooks Branch will be so happy that I launched his movie writing/directing that he will cast me in a small, but pithy, role in his next film and my movie career will be launched.